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Glite Dictionary
at best

at best

123 3.5
Only in the best case is the result not very good
  • idiom
translation icon : como mucho
  • At best, the defense would be a charge of manslaughter.
  • minimal at best
  • partial at best
  • tenuous at best

And eventually they said, well, at best it's prostitution.

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Examples

  • We have months at best and weeks at worst.

    cari can read

  • Love between the sexes was a transitory thing at best, here today, gone tomorrow.

    Fiction book (1990)

  • So that argument is at best out of date.

  • Three hours later, I dragged myself out of the library having worked at best three of the problems.

  • It's our job to deal with people whose grasp on reality may be loose at best.

    John, 316 (2021)

  • When the results came back, they were at best incomplete and confusing.

  • Iran with a nuclear program that is at best on hold, not rolled back.

  • Her coordination is unstable at best.

    Poor Things (2023)

  • Dividends are a secondary issue at best in Vanderbilt today.

  • When the project was approved, our timeline was at best overly ambitious.

Antonyms

at worst
35 3.6

If things go as badly as possible, expect the most serious result

How Bad

at worst
35 3.6
at best
123 3.5

Surface Forms

at best positive

Morphology

at + best

The meaning 'in the most favourable case' is directly compositional from 'at' (indicating a point/state) + 'best' (the most favourable), yielding 'in the best case' which implies a limited/optimistic bound. This construction is cross-linguistically common (e.g. French 'au mieux', Spanish 'en el mejor de los casos'), so a B1 learner who knows the constituents will likely infer the MWE's meaning.

Etymology

At best asks you to picture the word best as the highest point you can reach, so it shows the most you could hope for. That's why saying 'at best' means 'even then' the result is limited or not very good.